Strategy Gamer Weekend News Bulletin - July 19th, 2019

By Joe Robinson19 Jul 20190

After a brief hiatus (annual leave), we’re back with our weekly round-up of seven interesting stories from the world of strategy gaming. We don’t always get to cover everything during the course of a week, so we’re now taking the time to write up some short snippets of some of the more interesting announcements that we didn't get a chance to cover. Enjoy!

Gloomhaven Enters Early Access

It’s all Gloomhaven all the time at the moment, although this will probably be the last you hear of it for a while on this column because the game has finally entered into Steam Early Access. As a recap, this is a digital translation of the infamous legacy board game. In practical terms, Gloomhaven is going to be similar to fantasy tactical RPG, potentially with rogue-like elements as ‘Legacy’ mechanics in board games essentially translate into persistence and/or perma-death between game sessions.

Asmodee Digital have warned that this initial phase of Early Access is probably only going to appeal to people who are already familiar with the board game or who play a lot of tactical RPG games, there’s not much of a tutorial at the moment. There’s a snazzy new launch trailer, although it doesn’t show any gameplay unlike previous trailers. We’ll try and do some more in-depth coverage on this game when we can.

Total War Three Kingdoms Eight Princes DLC

We’re only a couple of months out of launch, but Creative Assembly has already announced its first ‘Chapter Pack’ DLC for Total War: Three Kingdoms. In a surprising turn of events, the Eight Princes expansion actually moves the timeline forward to 100 years after the events of the main campaign, with an all-new scenario featuring different characters & units. The narrative is based on a period of civil war known as the Disorder of the Eight Kings.

Creative Assembly have said that this is just one of the kinds of DLC they want to add to the game, and a free patch launching at the same time will provide updates to the main campaign. Eight Princes is due out on August 8th, so there’s really not long to wait. Here's an FAQ, if you want to know more.

Command & Conquer Red Alert Teaser

EA dropped an update on reddit regarding how their various Command & Conquer remasters were coming along. Tl;dr – it all seems to be progressing smoothly, and because they’ve finally been able to make Red Alert playable, they decided to share some of the new art assets they’ve been creating for the game. Everyone loves a Tesla Tanks, so they dropped a still showing off how it’ll look.

Nocked! Releases on Steam

If you’re a reader of Pocket Tactics, you may know that one of the community’s more revered games is King of Dragon Pass and its recent successor Six Ages: Ride like the Wind. These are narrative/text driven strategy games that provide recognisable tropes such as resource management, base building, army management etc… delivered through the medium of a text-based adventure game.

Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood by Andrew Schneider is a game in a similar vein where you play as Robin Hood, fighting the good fight in 12th Century England. It released on iOS to critical acclaim years ago, but now has arrived on Steam. It’s very different from our usual fare, but if you’re looking for something a bit more thoughtful and less action-heavy (and/or like Robin Hood) then this might be worth checking out.

Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 Patch

We’ve been a bit lax in our coverage of this game- something I’m keen to fix, but for anyone still interested a new patch was released at the start of the week. It’s largely a bug-sweep, but it also addresses several concerns with the campaign and faction-specific mechanics that needed balancing. Read the full patch notes here.

Railroad Corporation Sandbox Update

A token bit of Sim/Management news: Early Access tycoon game Railroad Corporation has received a new update which adds a Sandbox mode. This new mode offers two maps unique to sandbox that come with extra settings and options, such as starting research and contract generation, and you’re also able to replay completed campaign missions in sandbox mode without deadlines, objectives or persistence.

Nowhere Prophet Releases Today

A final quick update to let you know that Nowhere Prophet – a unique single-player deck-building strategy card game – is releasing later today. This is one we’ve been looking forward to over on Pocket Tactics, but since the mobile versions seem to be AWOL at the moment PC will have to do. I’ve dabbled around with it in beta; it’s pretty good. This is essentially a Roguelike game played with cards. You are in charge of a Caravan of people trying to make it across a harsh, post-apocalyptic world (procedurally generated, of course). Your caravan of followers is represented by your deck of cards, and when you fight in the tactical turn-based mode you use those same cards to fight. If a card gets destroyed though, that’s it forever. You have to find new ‘cards’ (people, gear, tactics etc..) as you go along.

There’s no multiplayer or anything so comparisons to things like Hearthstone don’t really work, but you do draw cards and play them to a field. This also has extra tactical depth in terms of positioning. The art style is very nice, and I can see this being a great game to play on the couch... like… ON YOUR PHONE.

That's all for this week's new bulletin - if you see anything else worth shouting out about, feel free to leave a comment below!